Passionate about IP! Since June 2003 the IPKat weblog has covered copyright, patent, trade mark, info-tech and privacy/confidentiality issues from a mainly UK and European perspective. The team is David Brophy, Birgit Clark, Merpel, Jeremy Phillips, Eleonora Rosati, Darren Smyth, Annsley Merelle Ward and Neil J. Wilkof. You're welcome to read, post comments and participate in our community. You can email the Kats here

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Tuesday, 30 August 2005

The UK Patent Office is seeking views in (yet another) public consultation. This time the subject-matter is whether the UK should retain its own patent classification key (the list of codes which identify the type of technology which is the subject of patent applications). The continuing need for the UK’s key has been called into question since the European Patent Office has its own key and there is an internationally recognised system under the PCT.

The Patent Office has identified 3 possible outcomes:

Continue to use the UKC key as at present

Freeze the key and continue to apply the frozen UKC terms to all published UK patent specifications

Abandon the UKC key and no longer apply UKC terms to published patent specifications

The IPKat can’t see why the UK needs its own way of coding patent applications in this situation. He also wonders who has time to respond to the glut of public consultations that the Patent Office has engaged in this summer.

5 comments:

Guy
said...

The IPC is widely used and by treaty shown on many published patent applications. Like all search aids it has its limitations. One of the most serious is that the code is applied on the basis of a patent document's claims rather than the disclosure in the document. The UK system, evolved over many years, is based on the disclosure in the document. It is not perfect; this is due to the use of human beings in its implementation. However for searchers, the commentator is a minor one, the loss of the UK coding would be a tragedy.

It seems to me that part of the trouble is that classification systems are used by different people for different purposes. If you're looking for prior art, document-based disclosure seems more important while, if you're looking for potential commercial opportunities or for technology to licence-in, a claims-based classification may have more to offer. I assume that an experienced patent searcher will know how to play either system prtty efficiently.